


Impermanence

by ossseous (ozean)



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Death, M/M, Rating May Change, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 17:18:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11189739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ozean/pseuds/ossseous
Summary: There's not much to do in Cairo at night, but it's fine. They like their nights quiet anyways.





	Impermanence

He was one of those people who knew the sound of water as it sloshed against a ship’s hull. So specific a sound, the rush and splash of it sluicing through barnacles in choppy waters. There were so many of his kind who came before him and would continue to arrive in droves long after. They were the ones who knew the intricacies of life at sea, like how different salt could taste. Sweeter, when breathed off the air. Bitter, when licked from the sweat clinging to one’s lips under a relentless Atlantic sun.

It was the kind of trip taken by the more poorly-made boys. The bastards and the undistinguished. Languishing unknown behind the threadbare legacies of whores and the poor. How they grappled for recognition. He in particular floundered under his father’s shadow, back when he was just a boy circling the hog pen while his father flattered woman after woman. Made child after child. Fought campaign after campaign. So often he heard of that man’s exploits across the Mediterranean, but they were only stories to him. Distant battles that meant little more than bed time stories. A new one every week when the slaves read his letters to them.

No, he couldn’t have stayed in that shadow for long. Not when it didn’t stretch far enough to encompass the sprawl of his own growing ambition. When did he learn that he wanted to be something more than another forgotten military man fighting in forgotten wars? Perhaps it was the moment Columbus died in Valladolid. A once great man diminished into the fraility of nothing. The news of his passing trickled down to Trujillo like the water in the streets after a summer rain. He knew he could do so much more than a man rotting away so far from the land he claimed.

Of course, that meant going to the New World. Something ripe to conquer, most of it still clean of the greedy hands that longed to mold it. A whole entire world away and across a pit of endless water nonetheless. Those days wore heavy, the storms filling the skies with towering walls of an angry ocean. It could wrench the bowels of even the most fortified of men at one point or another. But there was no returning, as least not without a legacy to his name.

He hated those lands when they arrived. They all tried so hard to change them. Warp them. Make them their home. It didn't matter how many innocent people they killed in the process.

And yet his dissatisfaction with second best damned, he continued on, hungry for every new inch of land they stole. Drawn south, some might say. Pushed on like the wings of the ruffs he saw each winter in the skies of the Crown of Castile.

The indios despised him and yet he dreamt of a day they wept just to look upon him. In fear or love, he didn’t really care either way. And it’s a truth of power he knew. Knew it like the back of his own hand when Atawallpa was gone and there wasn’t one single thing those indios could do about it.

And yet, it still wasn’t enough. When he shut his eyes, in the years that flittered past, he did not hear the strangled sputters and gasps escape Atawallpa in his last seconds. Instead he heard the soft murmur of Castilian in the afternoon markets. Or the sound of his footsteps ringing out upon the setts of the plaza mayor he galloped through as a child.

That valley, with the Moche river cutting through it like a snake through that green, green brush, needed a name. Something new to be christened. He wondered, when Almagro conceived it, did he whisper it like a secret over drying ink or buried between some poor indio girl’s legs. Trujillo, Trujillo, Trujillo. Something to appease, something to salvage the dregs of a dying friendship that never should have lasted so far beyond the equator. Not with men like them. Ones hungry for a power that would never, ever appease the dry ache of starvation, the keenest sense of lacking, deep inside of them.

So the name brought back that acrid yet comforting reminder of how the church bells would ring out each afternoon. The quiet thrums fluttering through the walls of the villas. But it meant nothing. And meant even less after Cuzco.

And men like them, perhaps they were never meant to last too long. As though whatever was holding them together, that consuming need to claim as much as the world as they could get their hands on, could eat them alive. In that way, Almagro’s death was hardly a surprise to anyone. another man down, what was one skeleton in a pit of many?

That should have been it. He should’ve grown older, fatter, wandering through hacienda after hacienda and the quiet streets that echoed only the anguished cries of the sick and dying.

How was he to know the anger of a son? His own father couldn’t even remember to put him in the will. Every other one of his bastards listed and acknowledged. Yet he, the eldest, the one who craved recognition the most, remained overlooked. The distance between them wasn’t bitter, wasn’t even angry. He knew boys who got half that, or even less. Some didn’t even get a name. But it affects a person, to look upon a parent and never know their love. To understand then better than anything, how alone a person truly is. So that passion, that unquellable longing to know the satisfaction of benediction for one’s blood made no sense to him, the unlovable son.

He finally found that passion. Not in his own child or some epiphanic appreciation for his long dead father. Rather he found it at the sound of screams echoing through the palace. Even more still when his fingers shook to cinch his breast plate. Finally, wholly, when he found the intimacy in each and every stab of El Mozo’s sword.

The pain was lancing at first. A sharp burn as his nerves fought to understand what to do, how to react, how much pain to feel.

Maybe then he finally accepted that New Spain was never going to be like Spain. They burned the thatch and they razed the temples. They grew atop them the cities they dreamed of as they remembered home each night, carbon copies of the lives they left behind just to get more. More of everything, silver, land, slaves, God. A new place where they filled the town with columns to line the avenues, balustrades to cut into the skies, and the gentle hum of church bells to beckon them to mass. But underneath their feet the stones remained deep in the earth, inerasable and etched into the land like a scar.

Did he think of his legacy, in those moments? His blood slipping across floors scrubbed by slaves, shed only when Almagro slithered his way back into the narrative by way of his own. It was quiet then, the palace empty, the assassins fled with a son avenged.

Ibis, in all honesty, thought there must have been something comforting in how, in the end, one knows they must die. It doesn’t matter who they were or what they did. Everyone inevitably dies and everyone inevitably rots away. The Christians of the Middle Ages called it Memento mori and used it to their advantage. And as American is wont to do, it had to change that “remember you will die” into a “fear you will die.”

When he was only a young man, Pizarro dreamed of legacy that out lasted him and the nation he would birth. Was it divine punishment for his crimes? A violent, painful, slow death couldn’t be matched by what followed when the great brute wound up stuffed in a box beneath the floorboards of the cathedral basilica whilst some unknown man got his name, his recognition, all the power he killed a nation of men for. The whole deal of prayer and adoration upon a marble altar of his greatness.

In the end, he was indistinguishable from any other corpse rotting under a church.

But he and Jacquel were too deeply in league with death to feel much beyond the obligation of its existence. The kid before them, limbs already lovingly acquainted with rigor mortis as Jacquel massaged the stiff muscles of his shoulders into pliancy, would be no different. Within a generation or two he would be nothing more than an obituary on a microfiche. If he was lucky, a misspelled name a couple branches up on the family tree. His skin ashen, barely even scarred with acne, dissolved away into the rich soil of the Mississippi floodplain.

Ibis couldn’t help but watch as Jacquel pulled skin back together again. The cluster of neat little pierces to his liver mended by equally neat little stitches. The boy was not one of the conquistadores, though surely he thought himself as great as one. The scar tissue had built over the years, layering over his knees, elbows, the once soft heels of his palms. People took pride in those kinds of scars and they were far from uncommon in the more reckless. Hundreds of years passing like an exhale and humans continued to churn out their poorly-made boys, always with something to prove.

Like coursing through the air on a skateboard was like sailing across the open ocean, or picking a fight with some homeless man was like conquering an empire.

Ibis hovered, as he always did. His curiosity too strong to allow him to go off to his office where the pages of his books and ledgers ached to be smoothed down by his fingers, marked by his pen. Not to mention the paperwork hidden somewhere beneath it.

“Well, at least he had fun,” he said, circling the table a second time. Jacquel only regarded him minutely as he settled down on his stool.

“Maybe a little too much,” Jacquel offered in turn.

It takes a body days to start to turn, something most funeral homes won’t tell you. A little too eager to get bodies in the ground as some of them are, the fact a body can store for days and days tends to slip the mind. However, in the young man's case, it certainly didn’t take long to determine the cause of death and to find himself in their firm.

Laying there he almost looked alive. Well, except for the lack of color, or the way his eyes already started to sink in, he could've just been asleep. Something that tended to be a bit more disconcerting to be around than the more obviously dead.

“I assure you, there’s no such thing as too much fun.” He finally stopped on the opposite side of the table, hand gripping the metal edge as he finally gave in and leaned forward. Just to get a bird’s eye view of the young man’s demise. “’Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.’”

“So he’s valiant now? For trying to bully the wrong homeless man out of his gutter?”

Ibis chuckled at that, just a little, and stepped away. He came back with one of the spare stools rolling behind him, the sound of the casters echoing off of every piece of metal of in the room. “Perhaps not. Or perhaps he was just standing up for himself. You have to admit, there is something admirable about someone willing to die for something they believe. No matter how tasteless that belief might seem to you or me.”

Of course, Jacquel didn’t have to admit it and Ibis knew Jacquel would never understand his interest in impartiality.

“I doubt it will seem so admirable when you see his mother crying over his grave tomorrow.”

He didn’t respond for a second. After a moment, he peered up across the remains to find Jacquel had stopped what he had been doing. He had long since finished with the lacerations and moved on to sewing the jaw shut. His needle hovered in the air as he regarded him. Ibis frowned. “Indeed.”

-

There was an art to grief, at least in the ability to step aside and witness it unfold. They mastered it years and years before and as the times changed and as grief changed, they changed with it.

He remembered better than anyone the once wailing widows. The fainting parents and the destroyed sobs of dissected lovers. The sorrow of those left behind as they flung themselves over caskets and searched their souls for a reason to continue living on. But in recent decades, grief had become so much quieter, shameful, something to hide. Sometimes the parlor might see a choked off sob or an artful tear. But mainly they saw the extended relatives, the in-laws, the grandchildren, the aunts and uncles. Their lack of passion didn’t mean they weren’t sad. But that person in the other room, room temperature and gradually turning, wasn’t someone who’s permanent non-presence would impact them in any meaningful way.

The ones who knew the remains more closely—knew the little ticks about them, like how clumsily they held their pens, or if they hummed in the shower, or if they ate dinner at 4 PM or 8 PM, or what their favorite brand of shampoo was—they were like fanciful creatures in the parlor. Only seen on the rarest of occasions. He often met with them in fleeting moments on the phone or the passing along of condolences as the procession filed away and severed their ties with the deceased one last time.

So Ibis didn't expect the boy’s mother would be the one who came in with a bag of his favorite clothes. While he’d fully expected someone, he wasn’t quite prepared to find her standing meek and quiet and waiting. He let that prickling moment of surprise wash away before he readied his most gentle tone.

“You’ve brought the clothes?” he asked.

She hesitated, and he looked down to her hands. There was so much to be said about a person’s hands. He’d seen the calloused, burned, soft, broken. Hers were swollen, the joints stiff. With wet cheeks and no voice, she handed the plastic bag over. She couldn’t seem to unhook her fingers from around the handles and he couldn’t tell if it was the age raging through her bones or her own reluctance to let those precious items go. Eventually she unfurled her fingers, one at a time and with great labor.

“It’s a good choice,” he said, peeking into the bag. It was something he said to everyone when they brought them in.

He laid out the contents on the table between them with care and gentleness. The folded shirt, the ironed jeans, the shoes--everything and all of it. The mother didn’t move though, her hands clasped before her as she stared at each article of clothing, cataloging them each in her memory. He wondered if, as she went through his closet and plucked through his drawers, she warred with herself over how much of his leftover life to keep. How much to give away? What all was she was willing to never see again?

He didn’t rush her. He never rushed anyone. It was important to give them as much time as they needed in moments like those. And sure enough, she reached her hand out and pressed her fingers over the material of the folded shirt. Slipped them up to pinch the hem at the shoulder, as though she was giving her son’s arm one last squeeze.

She didn’t speak, her breath caught too thickly in her throat, giving her only mumbles to whisper. But she nodded and shuffled away and out the door without another word. Perhaps she would let herself crumble in the car before she drove home. Maybe she’d make it all the way back to the driveway before it finally and totally sunk in. In any other situation, it might have been awkward, but something about the surrealness of death put life in its own little cocoon where there were no norms to be broken, no awkwardness to be had, if only for a little while.

-

Jacquel was right. There was something a little anguishing about watching a mother cry over the grave of her child. It seemed somehow particularly unique to the multitudes of other anguishing there were. They lowered him into the earth and she bore the weight of every hand that rubbed her back, brushed her shoulder. Every half hug and every whole hug. But she didn’t move her eyes from that spot, not as soil filled in that hole in the earth and took her son away for good.

He never mingled much with the mourners. It was more appropriate to stand off to the side and be ready to intervene should any problems arise. But often some of the relatives ended up approaching him after the service. They’d thank him and surprisingly often, they gave him hugs. While he wasn’t too fond of that part himself, he made sure to never let it show. Something about loss made some people eager to hold onto anything they could, lest it get snatched away from them.

Ibis only waited for them to leave because he felt an appreciation for the silence of a cemetery once the procession gone. With the living gone, the dead could rest.

“A walk?” Jacquel asked.

He turned, almost having forgotten he was there. Jacquel did not always accompany him to the service, but for some reason he decided to that day. Perhaps it was the lull between corpses, perhaps he wanted some fresh air. He just took a step closer, lingered off to Ibis’ side like Ibis so often lingered at his.

Ibis looked over to the last remaining car. The woman’s sister waited patiently beside it for her to finish up and return to her quiet home. He almost said no. There was still paperwork to do back at the firm. Endless paperwork. More so, a story that scratched at his thoughts like an earworm.

“A walk,” he agreed.


End file.
